Topic: a study on face morphing algorithms

Motivation:
    Morphing is a novel technology that interpolates between two
images to create hybrid intermediate images. It can be of help for many
important applications, including synthesizing new image frames for
animations, extending the database for facial recognition applications,
and special effects for movies.

Goal:
    Our goal is to implement a morphing algorithm which does not need to
be trained. 

Method:
---- Implementation: we will implementthe morphing algorithm proposed by 
M. Bichsel.  In his 1996 paper [1], Bichsel 
defined the morphing problem as finding the morphing field that has 
the maximum conditional  probablity given the initial and final images.  
Once this most-probable morphing field is found, we can
linearly interpolate it to synthesize the sequence of intermediate images.
---- Application: (if time-permitting) 
If time allowing, we would like to do the following experiments.  
(1) Apply our algorithm on pairs of photos of the face of a person with
different poses, to synthesize  a sequence of photos of the face with
different poses.
(2) apply the algorithm on faces of different people to
create the hybrid faces. Maybe the hybrid faces can be used to predict
the face of a baby from those of his parents. 
(3) We may also use morphing
to generate an animation from just several image frames. Maybe morphing
can also be used to help video compression because we can drop
off many intermediate image frames since they can be regenerated
by morphing.

Hopefully, we can perceptually evaluate the algorithm and point out 
possible ways to further improve it

Reference:
[1] Martin Bichsel, "Automatic Interpolation and Recognition of Face 
Images by Morphing", proceedings of the 2nd  international conference
on automatic face and gesture recognition, pp128-135
[2] Jonas Gomes et al. "Warping and morphing of graphical objects ", 
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (1999).

Group members :
Yi-Wen Liu    4643110    jacobliu@stanford.edu
Yu-Li Hsueh   4733267   yuli@stanford.edu



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Yi-Wen Liu
Ms/PhD student, Electrical Engineering department
Stanford University

1999-2000 President, Stanford Taiwanese Student Association
TEL: (H) 650-497-9839
homepage: http://www.stanford.edu/~jacobliu
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He who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 18:14)
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